Press Review

“Why do our young people prefer to surf the Internet all day long, engage in fruitless debates on Facebook and form various social movements?” asks “Hraparak.” “One movement activist attributes that to the fact that young people gravitating towards politics are, as a rule, obsessed with making careers and that politics is a discredited occupation. Therefore, they don’t want to enter that field and be accused of participating in the pan-Armenian tussle for posts. But the history of social movements tells us that eventually they will either die down or become politicized because it is big politics that holds the key to solving all issues.”

Lragir.am comments on what it sees as growing uncertainty over the holding of fresh elections in Armenia which the opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK) says must be called by the beginning of September. “The formation of a legitimate government is an important objective,” writes the online journal. “But no less important is the constitutionality of that process.” There is a danger, it says, that a snap election would simply “legitimize an illegal government.” That is why the conduct of elections is much more important than their timing, concludes Lragir.am.

In an interview with “Aravot,” Tigran Khzmalian, a member of the Sardarapat radical opposition movement, criticizes the HAK’s dialogue with the government, saying that it is irrelevant to the pressing issues facing Armenia and Armenians. “It doesn’t represent the society, the people or the real opposition,” he says. Khzmalian claims that solutions proposed by the government and the HAK are not credible “because they don’t reflect our real life and challenges facing our country.”

Ara Nedolian, an eminent intellectual, tells “Zhamanak” that Armenia would have hardly needed such a dialogue had its governments been formed as a result of free and fair elections. “When such a mechanism doesn’t work, as is the case in Arab world or in the post-Soviet area, things degenerate into uprisings and confrontations,” he says. “Armenia’s case is really unique as it reminds me of the dismantling of dictatorship during the collapse of the USSR.”

“Yerkir” notes that unlike Azerbaijan, Armenia has still not officially responded to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s proposals on how to push the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process further forward. “The fact that Baku had no problem with quickly reacting [to the Russian proposals,] whereas Armenia is delaying its response indefinitely demonstrates that Medvedev’s proposals are primarily unacceptable to Yerevan,” speculates the paper.